EU Cookie Law and those pesky pop-ups

Help – these pop-ups are driving me nuts!

We can only sympathize…

There has been a lot of talk about this law, whether it actually helps internet users and what is the best approach to staying legal. We went to an excellent briefing organised byeBusiness Club – the speaker, who was a qualified lawyer, suggested that the minimum course of action would be to draw users’ attention to the site’s privacy / cookie policy, with a link on each page. So this was our advice to our customers. Then, over a period of time, we noticed that many web sites tended to implement a ‘we use cookies’ pop-up. Conducting a brief straw poll, we struggled to find anyone who actually read what these pop-ups said or followed the links through to the privacy policy. “I just click on it to make it go away” was the common response.

Minimal Intrusion

So – as everybody seemed to be adding these pop-ups, we decided to follow suit. However, our customers did not want the message from their carefully designed web site confused by an irritating pop-up, so we went for a minimalist approach. As we tend to use cookies just for site functionality and tracking visitors stats, we state that we use cookies and use of the web site indicates acceptance of our cookie policy. The pop-up draws the visitor’s attention to this, with a link to the cookie policy, then quietly disappears. No confusing cookie control settings that most visitors will ignore / won’t understand.

Job done. If you would like help with your cookie policy or any aspect of your web site, please get in touch.